Gongol.com Archives: May 2020

Unconventional...but honestly, not any less reverent than the way some priests whip around an aspergillum. (You can sometimes see a slight smirk on the faces of the ones who really get a kick out of the action.)

The longer you think about it, the less sense locomotion-without-legs even makes. Snakes evolved from ancestors that had four limbs. Somewhere along the line, evolution somehow favored getting rid of limbs. How did this happen?

Jonathan V. Last puts it well: "[Whether] masks slow spread by 80% or 20%, we should be eager to bank that decline, because it's basically a freebie. In the grand scheme of economic expense and behavior modification, wearing a mask costs us next to nothing." In the words of research from Arizona State: "[W]hen the relative benefit is small, the absolute benefit in terms of lives is still highly nontrivial."

It boggles the mind that in 1932, she had to implore the publisher of the New York Times to stop calling her "Mrs. Putnam" instead of "Amelia Earhart". It's ironic she had to implore the Times to recognize her achievement under her own name, considering that Arthur Sulzberger became publisher of the NYT after his father-in-law died. Without "Mrs. Sulzberger" (nee Ochs), Mr. Sulzberger never would have gotten his own job.

The team at "Last Week Tonight" is proving that strong writing can carry a show right through the limitations of pandemic production without missing a beat. John Oliver is hitting his stride right now with pacing and the show might well be better without a studio audience.